Resilience or Rhetoric? A Framing Analysis of Flood Disaster Reporting in Pakistan’s Media

Floods are among Pakistan’s most common and devastating natural disasters, and they are becoming increasingly frequent and intense as a result of climate change, glacial melt, accelerated urbanisation, and weak governance. While coverage of climate change in 2025 has improved compared to 2010 and 2022 in terms of attention to climate change, it still silences local voices and long-term resilience narratives. However, much of the literature on disaster reporting in Pakistan has been descriptive, focusing on one-off events rather than situating them within wider framing theories, agenda-setting, and disaster journalism. This study employs qualitative document analysis (QDA) of a sample (n = 300) of media texts from five mainstream Pakistani media outlets (print and broadcast) published between June and August 2025. Drawing on framing theory and using a hybrid coding framework, this study examines causal attribution, impact reporting, actor representation, and narrative patterns. The results show ongoing sensationalism and political blame frames, low inclusion of community voices, and competing discourses of climate change versus nationalist explanations (especially cross-border water politics). This study contributes to global conversations about disaster communication by demonstrating the role of media in fragile governance settings to reveal and obscure the structural causes of vulnerability. Theoretically, it broadens framing and agenda-setting scholarship by showing the simultaneous functioning of dual causal narratives, scientific (climate-induced) and political (nationalistic). It also provides policy recommendations for more inclusive, accurate, and resilient disaster reporting.